


this haunting's anatomical

by runobody2



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, CW: Ianthe's Horrible Personality, F/F, Gideon technically is not in this but she's uh spiritually present, POV Ianthe, Post-events of harrow the ninth except the ones that contradict my AU concept, dark AU where 20 yrs after lyctorhood harrow doesn't remember gideon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:20:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26051779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runobody2/pseuds/runobody2
Summary: Ianthe hasn’t seen Harrow in over a year, which still feels like a meaningful unit of absence, even though two decades into her eternal youth she’s been trying to teach herself to think differently about time.Still, she spares an indulgent thought to considering how this reunion might have felt, if they were aging normally.  She would have been forty-something, which seems like it might have been an appropriate age for her and Harrowhark to be halfway through their second bitter divorce.Or: twenty years after Canaan house, Harrow and Ianthe on a planet of swamps and roses.
Relationships: (IMPLIED), (one-sided), Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Ianthe Tridentarius
Comments: 16
Kudos: 85





	this haunting's anatomical

**Author's Note:**

> As stated in the tags, this takes place in a canon divergent scenario where twenty years after lyctorhood Harrow still doesn't remember Gideon. Act 5 of the book presumably didn't happen. I didn't worry too hard about the technicalities to be honest, it's mostly just about how Ianthe might think about Harrow twenty years onwards.

> This haunting is anatomical. It is not about you. It is inside you. Everything’s made out of other organisms that you can’t see, living and dying hand in hand, blood in mouth, flesh in stomach. Somewhere within you, something has built a home. When was the last time you fed someone else at your table? Be glad that you still have something to offer. Don’t think about it so hard.

  * _[Do you sleep with two pillows, hoping the second will one day be used? [Y/N]](https://jade-ellsworth.tumblr.com/post/611515813879496704/why-are-you-haunted-a-survey)_



* * *

Afterwards, if she wants to refer to this planet, she’ll say: the horrid swampy one, with those absolutely disgusting insects. In reality, there’s only the one medium-sized horrid swamp on the whole of the place, but that’s where she spends the majority of her week there, tracking down Blood of Eden hideaways down between the mangrove roots, under the muddy saline. Surely it would seem characteristic of her to focus exclusively on the location of her personal tribulation, and if nothing else Ianthe Tridentarius knows how to play to type.

In truth, the swamp isn’t what she’ll remember best. It helps that she never has to let any of those illegally large wasps get within three feet of her; Lyctor’s privileges. (Which is ironic, as in life Naberius had never liked to deal with stray insects. Coronabeth was the one who always insisted, gallantly, on taking them outside.) Her boots do get unflatteringly caked with vegetal matter and dirt, but she’d been looking to get new ones anyways.

What she will remember best comes after she’s done with the swamp, when she’s gone into the city, to the market where she’s due to meet Harrowhark. There’s a scattered couple of booths selling roses beneath the dismal shade of tarpaulins, and a few more selling curries. In the midday heat, the whole square smells of attar.

Ianthe the First closes her eyes a moment, hoping to detect the curious unreadable quiet between the buzzing of all the warm thalergy around her that would indicate the presence of a fellow Lyctor. She hasn’t seen Harrow in over a year, which still feels like a meaningful unit of absence, even though two decades into her eternal youth she’s been trying to teach herself to think differently about time. 

Still, she spares an indulgent thought to considering how this reunion might have felt, if they were aging normally. She would have been forty-something, which seems like it might have been an appropriate age for her and Harrowhark to be halfway through their second bitter divorce. Instead, twenty years and three kisses (and only that first one having been on the mouth!) later, it isn’t the toothache hurt of lost time or a missed connection that she feels. They’re both so young, still. She’s just now getting old enough to know how young she is.

Ianthe’s turning up nothing on the necromantic detection front, unless she counts the discovery of the dying frog in a barrel of dried apricots that’s going to give someone an awful surprise one of these days, which she does not. This isn’t surprising, as Harrow’s projected arrival is later that afternoon, and even if it wasn’t she’s been more or less attempting to find a needle in a stack of bone chips.

But when Ianthe opens her eyes, they land naturally on Harrow there across the market, painted but unveiled in the sunlight. She doesn’t look nearly so uncomfortable in the blazing heat and milling crowd as she had the first few times Ianthe remembers seeing her planet-side in a place like this, though that isn’t saying much. Still, there’s something impressive and unexpected about the way she’s been able to acquire the sort of insouciant ease that would make a stranger’s eyes slide respectfully over her no matter her unusual outfitting. As Ianthe watches, Harrow hands over a coin to a vendor coolly, even pleasantly. So she’s learned a few new tricks. But not too many, Ianthe concludes, as she watches the woman hand back what appears to be a totally plain and unseasoned white flatbread.

Ianthe’s moment of indulgent musing from earlier catches up with her as she slides through the crowd towards Harrow. Twenty years is almost as long as she’d spent alive before Lyctorhood, and longer than Harrow had had. Without meaning to, she thinks of Harrow’s cavalier, who had known her, what, seventeen years at the very most? (It wasn’t like Ianthe could ask, now.) Who had never known Harrow, as Ianthe now did, standing calm and self-assured under the orange glare of an alien star, buying flatbreads as a treat as the feathery border of her normally lightless hair went to the brown of antique photo film in the radiance. And who more likely than not never would.

“Why are you back so early?” Ianthe says, when she’s close enough. “I know for a fact Mercymorn gave you permission to be messy.”

Harrow turns casually, without startling, even though Ianthe had approached from what should have been a blind spot. “There wasn’t any need. Not a one of them were able to hold out past the first broken bone.” She says it in those cold contemptuous tones she must have gotten a lot of practice in, growing up on the Ninth. But Ianthe dissects with pleasingly little effort that this is the disdain of a girl who had never really acquired the taste for torture. She’s learned the shades of Harrowhark’s kindness. After all, Ianthe wears the mark of it, from distal phalanx up to humerus, gilded under her right sleeve.

It seems she hasn’t quite worked out the self-indulgence yet, because she asks, “Missed me, Harry?” And then, watching Harrow’s expression very carefully for that shivering moment of lapse that she knows is coming, “And be fair to yourself. I’m sure you now have a facility for breaking bones that Gideon never did.”

She catches it then, the narrowing pause of a girl who doesn’t know herself. Ianthe smiles in the way of a girl who knows better. “Don’t say his name,” Harrow says, with her real nunnish contempt. Ianthe wonders if she’d been remembering something real, or if it had been a story. Maybe they were all stories.

“Oh, I didn’t,” Ianthe tells her, and reaches over to rip off a chunk of bread from where Harrow had just bitten and pop it into her mouth with all the light mirth of a teenaged lover.

She turns and starts to walk through a winding alleyway, listening for Harrow’s aggrieved splutter as she follows behind her, slowed no doubt by the bulky weight of the sword she has strapped to her back, whose provenance she does not understand. Ianthe’s mouthful of stolen bread is plainly flavored but perfectly chewy. She looks around idly for where the nicest possible inn might be hiding; the shuttle isn’t picking them up until tomorrow.

She remembers when she wanted more than anything for Harrow to renounce her half-life, to betray and free herself, and in so doing pick Ianthe, first saint of selfish choices. Ianthe had resented being made Harrow’s jailer. Now, she can’t imagine any other feeling with the heady buoyancy of this one, walking the heat-baked stones of this humid yarn-tangle city with Harrow indignant and slightly confused behind her. The years have changed Ianthe, too. Softened or strengthened her, she thinks, as she realizes that the burden of Harrow’s secrets rests now with the decadent weight of a golden locket around her neck.

I know what— _who_? No, Ianthe thinks with decided lack of charity, not quite—the old Harrow died for. Maybe she doesn’t need the nicest inn after all. She’d settle for one where they’d be told, sorry, there’s just one bed left, who would have guessed? _Well, nothing we haven’t done before_ , Ianthe might drawl, and know that Harrow too was thinking of the slippery sweetness of those passing weeks when nowhere else had felt safe to her but Ianthe’s room. And then in the night, in the dark, after Harrow’s fallen into her uneasy sleep, she could reach out and cup the heat of Harrow’s skull, and know what she’d done to it, and know who else was trapped in there.

Who else could say the same?

**Author's Note:**

> when otherwise unoccupied, i may be found on [tumblr](https://jade-ellsworth.tumblr.com) writing and thinking about harrow the ninth, as if possessed.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [when all the wild summer](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26105191) by [runobody2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/runobody2/pseuds/runobody2)




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